Every organization has a culture. Formal strategic planning can be an asset to your work culture, demanding high performance work practices from your team and increasing profitability. However, culture can also get in the way of your success in a variety of ways. Here are some common work culture disorders:
1) Culture of Blame: When something goes wrong, the fingers start pointing and people start hiding. This culture prevents people from learning from change and leads to people hiding their mistakes.
2) Culture of Silos: The word “they” overwhelms the word “we” as departments become independent and look at other departments and teams as separate entities or even rivals. This creates barriers to a high-performance culture and to improvement opportunities that could be realized through cross-functional cooperation between departments. Sometimes it even creates internal problems as departments have a negative impact on each other.
3) Culture of Top-Down: The people at the top make all the decisions and the people at the bottom just try to keep up. This encourages disengagement and mediocrity among employees.
4) Culture of Nice: Conflict is looked at as negative and is avoided at all costs. Key issues are not discussed in public but might be whispered in private. These organizations often change direction constantly to maneuver around difficult issues.
5) Culture of Self: Everyone pretty much keeps to themselves until a person has been there for a long time. Even then, meaningful work relationships are scarce.
6) Culture of Inferiority: The organization still thinks of itself as a small business even as it has grown. Change is resisted because “we’ve always done it this way.”
The good news is that these disorders can be addressed and cured. Our team of business development consultants can diagnose those areas of your business stifling growth toward high-performance culture and greater profitability.
